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HP is considering spinning off or selling the PC business. Whoa….what does this mean to our Avid, Autodesk, Assimilate and Adobe users who count on HP to deliver high performance HP workstations?

My first take is good luck changing your business model. That being said, every company needs a strategy and HP is making a distinct move away from the consumer and lower margin business’. That said, we’re talking about a $42 Billion top line business with $2 billion in profits, equaling 4.76 % net profit business. My first take is, HP is passing up on an amazing opportunity to provide vendors with an integrated business to consumer workflow, well, not everyone can do Apple.

I had an opportunity to speak to the HP workstation team and get some insight about what this means moving forward for our clients who use HP products. The good news is the Workstation team is almost giddy. They believe carving out the PC business will allow them greater flexibility to design more products and not get caught up in HP’s divisions of server versus software and truly compete with more relevant solutions to complete high value workflows within the media industry. They’ll be a “nimble” and profitable Company.

So, HP warranties are safe, all products will be serviced by HP. This transition could take up to eighteen months. My one worry is the lack of development during this time as HP shifts resources to “higher margin” opportunities such as their recent acquisition of Autonomy. Stay tuned, we’ll keep you updated.

Last week one of our clients came into Key Code Media Burbank to do some testing with the H.264 Pro Recorder from Black Magic.

“There’s a lot to like about this but some trade offs. I like it’s the size of a turkey sandwich. with low power, low heat, no noise. great option for our application which would live at someone’s desk.

The real time h264 looked pretty good. we noticed some compression glitches when capturing with the “native” profile.

No ability to customize an encoding profile and very limited options in a drop down. the box does not make any changes to the geometry, cropping, interlacing, etc. Also doesn’t allow any change in audio settings other than selection of the embedded channels to capture. So if you feed it 1280×720 HD-SDI, you get a 1280×720 h264, if you feed it 720×480 SDI, you get 720×480 h264.

Definitely not a replacement for a fully featured capture/encoding platform but for certain singular uses like this one, might fit the bill nicely.”

Avid now supports Apple OS 10.7 Lion with Media Composer 5.5.3 and Symphony 5.5.3, BUT they only support it with Local Storage. Unity, ISIS and Interplay are not supported at this time. http://bit.ly/pkkptA (knowledge base link).

Key Code Media will be reaching out to the third party SANs to get their qualification timeline.